Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyber attacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

The shifting narrative underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly picks and chooses intelligence to suit his political purposes. That has never been more clear than this week.

So this means that all of this time, while Trump has been waffling about whether or not Russia interfered in the 2016 election, he had actually already seen actual proof that they were, in fact, the guilty party.

So essentially everything he said about that 400-pound man in Jersey or the possibility that it was the Chinese, he already knew was pure bullshit.

That would suggest that the ONLY reason that Trump feigned ignorance was to provide cover for his Russian overlords.

Unless somebody has a better reason.

Because I sure don’t.

Update: In light of this new information from the New York Times, this seems especially traitorous.

The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media. I look forward to our second meeting so that we can start implementing some of the many things discussed, including stopping terrorism, security for Israel, nuclear……..

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This blog is dedicated to finding the truth, exposing the lies, and holding our politicians and leaders accountable when they fall far short of the promises that they have made to both my fellow Alaskans and the American people.

““When he just said last night (that) America is no longer under attack, I’m sorry — I’m an American, I’m under attack by Vladimir Putin right now,” McFaul added. “I hope he’ll stand up. But now they will make my life more difficult as I travel abroad, with Interpol, perhaps. They want to harass me and they want to intimidate me and make me QUIET.””

Anonymous
July 19, 2018 at 7:43 am

New Time Cover Has Some Creepy Trump-Putin Photoshopping
Certainly a summit of nightmare fuel.

The latest issue of Time magazine isn’t holding back when it comes to the topic of President Donald Trump’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The July 30 cover shows the two leaders as literally the same person, featuring an unsettling photoshopped melding of Trump and Putin into one super-mega-ultra ego.

Trump’s Russia Ambassador Is Having A Very Bad Week
Jon Huntsman has spent decades cultivating a reputation as a pragmatic Republican. Now some of his allies are urging him to ditch the Trump administration.

Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, is in a terrible, but entirely predictable, situation: Days after Huntsman spoke about the need to hold Russian government officials accountable for interfering in the 2016 election, his boss, President Donald Trump, stood alongside Vladimir Putin on Monday and told the world he believed the Russian president’s denial of any wrongdoing.

Trump made a muddled attempt to walk back those comments on Tuesday, but the damage had been done. Huntsman’s former colleagues and even family members suggested the ambassador was wasting his time trying to represent U.S. interests in Russia under Trump.

“Resign, if you have any honor,” John Weaver, a political consultant who worked on Huntsman’s 2012 Republican presidential campaign, tweeted.

“You work for a pawn, not a president. It’s time to come home,” wrote a columnist at the Salt Lake Tribune — a paper owned and published by Huntsman’s brother Paul.

Even Huntsman’s own daughter weighed in. “No negotiation is worth throwing your own people and country under the bus,” Abby Huntsman, who is also a Fox News anchor, tweeted in response to Trump’s comments.

“The July 30 cover shows the two leaders as literally the $AME PER$ON, featuring an unsettling photoshopped melding of Trump and Putin into one super-mega-ultra EGO.”

Anonymous
July 19, 2018 at 7:51 am

Report May Provide Proof That Trump Is a Russian Spy

A new bombshell New York Times report says that U.S. intelligence officials showed President Donald Trump indisputable evidence proving that Russian president Vladimir Putin personally ordered cyberattacks against the 2016 U.S. election — and yet Trump publicly is still casting doubt on the evidence he received over a year and a half ago.

…“The fact that the U.S. intelligence had obtained texts and emails of senior Russian officials and made it clear that Putin was involved,” Miller said, “and, even more importantly, that there was a human source close to Vladimir Putin who was cooperating with the intelligence community and providing information. That was key to this conclusion that Putin had directly ordered the intervention in the election.”

Miller said it was extremely unusual that intelligence “sources and methods” were revealed to the public. He said this almost never happens, and the fact that it did is evidence of deep mistrust of the president by the intelligence community.

Once again Republicans in the House have shown that they are more interested in protecting Donald Trump than they are in protecting the American people from a hijacking of their democracy by Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s latest controversies surrounding Russia have not gone over well with Republicans in Congress. But even worse for the GOP, they have not gone over well with the majority of American voters. As a result, Republicans on Capitol Hill are now desperately trying to find a way to distance themselves from the actions (and the words) of the president in order to avoid what they fear might be a disaster in this fall’s midterm elections.

There are less than four months until the elections, and new polls this week show Trump’s approval ratings are falling while the Democrats have increased their lead in the generic congressional ballot. A Democratic “Blue Wave” may be coming, and Republicans are trying to find some way to stop it.

What we know about Russia’s election hacking
U.S. officials have laid out a wealth of details about how they believe Moscow executed its plot.

The White House’s verbal gymnastics over Russia’s alleged campaign to hack American democracy threaten to obscure a basic fact: U.S. authorities have laid out a wealth of details about how they believe Moscow carried out its plot in 2016.

And, they say, Moscow is continuing to meddle in this year’s elections.

…Trump’s half-hearted statement on Tuesday walking back remarks undermining the findings of the U.S. intelligence community was crafted by adviser Stephen Miller, according to a Republican close to the White House. As Marine One touched down at Andrews Air Force Base on Monday evening, the backlash from pro-Trump lawmakers and activists was sufficient that the president as well as his senior advisers, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kelly and Miller himself acknowledged the need to do an about-face.

Miller took the lead, and Trump put the finishing touches on the statement — which, according to the Republican close to the White House, “didn’t pass the laugh test.” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) acknowledged the statement was significant given Trump’s propensity to dig in: “You could see it was very painful.”

But it wasn’t long before the president backslid again. In the latest twist, Trump seemed to suggest Wednesday he doesn’t think Russia is interfering in the midterms, after bragging about how “tough” he is on Russia.

Megyn Kelly viciously destroys Sean Spicer: ‘What you said wasn’t true and your boss said the same thing’

Megyn Kelly on Thursday grilled former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer about lies he and President Donald Trump told the American people.

During an interview to promote Spicer’s new book, Kelly asked the former press secretary if he acknowledged that his claims about the size of Trump’s inauguration were lies.

Spicer tried to deny that he had made a false statement, but Kelly interrupted.

“You hold on,” she said. “Was that true or was that not true?”

“What I said was the totality of the people that watched it online and everywhere [was larger than any other inauguration],” Spicer argued.

“You said, ever — in person!” Kelly exclaimed.

“In person or around the globe!” Spicer shot back.

“So you’re still standing by it?” the NBC host pressed.

“No,” Spicer admitted as the audience laughed. “I’m saying that I could have done that a heck of a lot better. But the point was that what we were conflating with the number of people stating one position vs. what I was trying to do — and admittedly not well.”

“And not truthfully,” Kelly pointed out.

“No!” Spicer gasped. “The number of people that watched it live on Twitter — hold on — that was the highest rated live Twitter that ever occurred. The website traffic was through the roof.”

“The number of people on the National Mall did not compare with the number that showed up for Barack Obama,” Kelly stated. “You went on to talk about the number of people who rode the Metro and you have those facts wrong too.”

“I screwed that day up,” Spicer lamented.

“What you said there wasn’t true and your boss said the same thing,” Kelly remarked. “[Trump is] the one that told you to go out there. You’re very defensive of him on this point. You know as well as I do that President Trump is the one who wanted the inauguration crowd size restated.”

“I’m taking responsibility for my actions,” Spicer said in defense of Trump. “I went out there, I said those words. I could have done a better job.”

For two more segments, Kelly continued to grill Spicer and accused him of “dodging” questions.

“Why can’t you just admit that he struggles with the truth,” Kelly said of Trump.

“I think he sells his policies and his achievements and his results,” Spicer stuttered. “That’s who he is.”

…“That is really the crown jewels of U.S. intelligence, and the fact that it made it out publicly was concerning to me,” Miller said. “I will say, after I found out, after I read that story last night and found that the president has known going back to a year and a half now about what exactly Vladimir Putin did, and he helped him cover up that crime by lying about it it publicly and help him cover up that crime by standing up on Monday and lying about it publicly, and it made U.S. intelligence officials wonder what happened in the meeting.”

During a panel discussion on MSNBC, terrorism and intelligence expert Malcolm Nance blasted Donald Trump for his complete disbelief in American intelligence agencies — and the way it’s influenced his relationship with Russia.

As Nance sees it, Trump “absolutely, flat-out does not believe anything that US intelligence says to him” because it often “violates the meta-narrative that’s in his head about how the world works.”

That meta-narrative, the ex-intelligence officer added, “is not intrinsic to Donald Trump,” but was “put there by the Russians.”

“As far back as 2013, he has adopted their worldview,” Nance said. “And that’s precisely what the Russians have always wanted.”

Trump “defaults to their position” because he was groomed to do so, the former cryptologist added.

“That narrative of Russia, good, their money, good, they want to be partners with him, they will enrich him in some way and everybody else is out to get him,” Nance explained. “It’s going to be very difficult going forward with anything until this president either disabuses himself of this opinion or until some action forces us to have a new administration.”

Really? By now we should all know why Donald Trump sided with Russian president Vladimir Putin against his own country and why, Wednesday, when a reporter asked him if Russia is still targeting U.S. elections, Trump answered “no.”

There he goes again protecting Putin—or not, according to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose lies are coming at an ever faster clip. She claimed at her Wednesday press availability that Trump was turning down any more questions, not saying no to a specific one on meddling. Then he took another question.

This is the same Sanders who said last week that chief of staff John Kelly was cringing at breakfast not because the president was delivering a tongue-lashing to the president of NATO but because there were no eggs and bacon, just a lousy pastry. It’s impossible to take her excuses seriously.

Trump is not so complicated that any scratching of heads is needed to get to why he persists in his protection of Putin. It’s the best way to insure Trump’s reelection. Amid the impulses driving Trump, none is more potent than not being a loser and proving to elites they were wrong about him. His constant denial that Russia meddled is not just to to protect his fragile ego from the suggestion he didn’t win fair and square, or to deny collusion, or stop the witch hunt; it’s to exonerate Putin, whose help dragged him over the finish line in the electoral college in 2016 and which he needs again in 2020.

Accused Russian Spy’s Boy Toy Is a Serial Fraud: Lawsuits
Long before Paul Erickson was introducing a bogus Russian ‘gun-rights activist’ around Washington, he was peddling bogus investments, angry former business partners said in court.

“Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have blocked a move to subpoena the interpreter from the Helsinki summit to testify about the private talks between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff, said Thursday he wanted the State Department interpreter to appear in closed session, saying Congress must “find out what was said” during the two-hour meeting.

The California lawmaker says he realizes it’s an “extraordinary” step to subpoena the interpreter, but it’s also extraordinary for the president to meet alone with a U.S. adversary.

Chairman Devin Nunes, also of California, led Republicans in a party line vote to table the motion. Nunes said a panel hearing on China was not an appropriate venue. The vote was 11-6.”<HP

Anonymous
July 19, 2018 at 8:56 am

How the National Prayer Breakfast plays into the indictment of an alleged Russian spy
Journalist and author Jeff Sharlet on the National Prayer Breakfast, Maria Butina, and the group that calls itself “the Family.”

…Yet according to the Department of Justice affidavit, one of the most striking elements of Butina’s case was the venue she allegedly chose to exert influence: the National Prayer Breakfast, a longstanding Washington tradition. The event has been attended by every president since Eisenhower and has about 4,000 attendees — influential policymakers and foreign dignitaries alike — annually.

At the 2016 and 2017 events, Butina allegedly met with unnamed American officials and “very influential” Russians, and seems to have successfully attempted to broker meetings between figures in these groups.

It’s striking when you consider that something more insidious than prayer is understood to be taking place at the breakfast, according to Jeffrey Sharlet, an associate professor of literary journalism at Dartmouth College.

In his 2009 book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Sharlet chronicled the influence of a Christian organization known publicly as “the Fellowship” (and internally as “the Family”), the founders and administrators of the National Prayer Breakfast. The Family — of which Sharlet reports Vice President Mike Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions are members — is an intensely powerful organization, whose specific vision of Jesus as the ideal “strongman” governs their political theology and who have found, in strongman-sympathetic President Trump, an ideal vessel for their beliefs.

“What’s interesting about Trump is that he’s not really a believer, yet he’s put together the most fundamentalist Cabinet in US history,” Sharlet told me Wednesday. “There has never been one like this. It’s the most Family-friendly.”

According to Sharlet, the Family frequently uses the National Prayer Breakfast, and the week surrounding it, as a backdoor recruiting and diplomacy tool, often using the events around the breakfast as a means of backchannel engagement with lobbyists and foreign governments that organizers feel share its “strongman” approach, without formal government oversight.

Gas lighting!
“Trump is already setting up a second meeting with Putin, and Putin is showing off his “weapons” in what can only be seen as d*ck waving over Trump. This is an international and national security crisis, not a time for the DHS Secretary to be misleading the public about Putin’s actions.

It is a fact that Putin interfered on behalf of Donald Trump. It also appears as if Trump worked with Putin to “win” this election. Which is to say, we did not have a fair, democratic election in 2016 – a fact that would alarm any DHS person whose loyalty was with this country.”

Anonymous
July 19, 2018 at 9:20 am

Powerful House Republican Admits They Are Engaged In A Cover-Up For Trump

…Republicans aren’t even pretending to do any oversight on Trump. They have no interest in investigating the president because they are covering up for him. As the House majority, Republicans have a constitutional duty to provide oversight over the Executive Branch of the US government, but they are turning a blind eye to investigating the crimes and corruption of the current administration.

Despite criticism, Trump looks to next Putin meeting and blames U.S. for marring first summit

…“I look forward to our second meeting so that we can start implementing some of the many things discussed, including stopping terrorism, security for Israel, nuclear proliferation, cyber attacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East peace, North Korea and more,” Trump said.

In Moscow, Putin said “powerful” U.S. forces were trying to sabotage the summit’s achievements, but said he and Trump had begun to improve U.S.-Russia ties anyway.

“It was successful overall and led to some useful agreements. Of course, let’s see how events will develop further,” Putin said in remarks to Russian diplomats from around the world, without disclosing the nature of the agreements to which he referred.

“We see that there are forces in the United States that are prepared to casually sacrifice Russian-U.S. relations, to sacrifice them for their ambitions in an internal political battle in the United States,” Putin said.

In the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents, Donald Trump had three options regarding his upcoming summit with Vladimir Putin: cancel, confront or cave.

He chose the last option. But his capitulation occurred on an alarming and unprecedented scale. Never before has a U.S. President so willfully catered to an American adversary and so effortlessly sacrificed American values and interests as the entire world watched. His performance starkly highlighted not only a lack of impulse control and appallingly poor judgment, but also a consistent and inexplicable willingness to submit to Russian interests. This was not a display of “America first,” but rather a very disturbing performance by a man who put himself and Russia above American interests and American values.

The Manchurian Idiot
After Helsinki, Trump isn’t as useful to Putin as one might think.

The broad consensus among U.S. and Western commentators is that Vladimir Putin “owned” Donald Trump at the U.S.-Russia summit in Helsinki this week. Trump echoed Russian talking points on meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, disowned his own intelligence community, and abstained from even the slightest criticism of his Russian counterpart—a marked contrast from his fierce attacks on America’s close allies in London and Brussels last week. So, score one for Putin.

But Putin seems to have already noticed that winning Trump amounts to a sort of catastrophic success. The extent of Trump’s isolation on Russia within the United States is a problem for Putin and one that he surely recognizes.

…This goal required Trump to demonstrate that he could simultaneously protect U.S. interests even while working with Putin and Russia. By instead appearing as Putin’s poodle, Trump undermined that goal. As the Russian state TV host Olga Skabeeva put it, “When Trump says our relations are bad because of American foolishness and stupidity, he really smells like an agent of the Kremlin.” If they can smell it even in Moscow, it must reek in Washington.

At the Helsinki press conference, one could almost see the moment that Putin realized that Trump had gone too far and that it would blow back against Russia in U.S. domestic politics.

Why Trump Is Getting Away With Foreign-Policy Insanity
The only people who can stop his sucking up to Russia have lost all their credibility.

…Instead, what the world saw was a U.S. president rejecting the findings of his own intelligence services—now headed by his own appointees, by the way—and accepting at face value Putin’s entirely predictable denials. Trump also tossed in a word salad of discredited conspiracy theories about former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s email server and other irrelevant nonsense, and he said that the legitimate investigation into possible Russian interference was utterly baseless and bad for the country. (That very last claim might be true—i.e., the suspicion that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia is bad for the country—but whether it is without foundation remains to be seen.)

The response to Trump’s performance was immediate, overwhelming, and almost entirely negative.

‘IT WAS NOTHING SHORT OF TREASONOUS’
How people in the United States and Russia responded to the Helsinki summit.

…“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”

Now we truly know that trump is delusional, his latest is to complain the fake media did not cover his meeting with putin. Has he already forgotten that he didn’t allow anyone else in the room while getting is orders from putin?

============================
US military is depending on Russian ambassador to tell them what happened between Trump and Putin

…..TRUMP: I don’t care what they covered. They don’t, they didn’t cover my meeting. The important thing, frankly, was the meeting that lasted for two and a half hours, or almost two and a half hours. And in that meeting, we discussed many, many things that were very, very positive for both countries….

Days after indictment of Russian military hackers, Trump invites Putin for fall White House visit

Guess who’s coming to a White House dinner, sometime between now and the November midterms? The man who ordered the Russian government to mount a wide-ranging hacking and propaganda campaign to alter the results of the United States presidential election, Russian kleptocrat Vladimir Putin.